The Fifth Discipline the Art and Practice of the Learning Organizationã¢ââ

Key words

The Learning Organization, double loop learning, strategy, creative tension

Summary

Some books are worth reading several times. This is one of them. Written in 1990 when the West was getting used to the post industrial world and the development of a noesis economy, it advocates the creation of a learning organization equally a way of achieving sustainable competitive advantage over your competitors. Companies that prosper will be those than learn more quickly. At the time this seemed like a very innovative thought in the command and control world of traditional management. Today many of these ideas have been integrated into highly successful companies.

In a learning organization, you have to merge thinking and interim in every individual

There are times when Peter Senge, seems to ask more questions than he answers. Some is fifty-fifty utopic such as his thought that :…the disciplines of the learning arrangement will, I believe, cease the taboo that has surrounded the topic of balancing work and family unit, and has kept information technology off the corporate agenda. Modern engineering science (and our willingness to adopt it) seems to have accomplished just the contrary. Even so, the book redefines the role of leadership and is almost philosophical, even spiritual. These ideas were later on echoed in Good to Great by Jim Collins and his concept of Level 5 leadership. It besides gives splendid insights into systems thinking and time management. The revised edition contains interviews with organizations such equally Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, Saudi Aramco, Oxfam and The World Bank.Some keys facts: Of every ten start-up companies, one half will disappear inside their start five years, only four survive into their tenth year, and only 3 into their fifteenth yr.In 1983, a Imperial Dutch/Beat out survey plant that one third of the firms in the Fortune 500 in 1970 had vanished.

Interesting quotes from the volume

The truly creative person knows that all creating is acheived through working with constraints. Without constraints there is no creating.
Or, as Ray Stata, CEO of Analog Devices, Inc., says, "In the traditional hierarchical organization, the top thinks and the local acts. In a learning organization, you lot accept to merge thinking and acting in every private"

Localness is particularly vital in times of rapid change.

Learning organizations practice forgiveness because, as Cray Research's CEO John Rollwagen says, "Making the error is penalty enough."

For nigh American business people the best rate of growth is fast, faster, fastest

Thus, a corporation cannot be "excellent" in the sense of having arrived at a permanent excellence; it is always in the land of practicing the disciplines of learning, of becoming improve or worse.

Simply mediocre people are always at their best.

Few large corporations alive even half as long as a person.

For almost American business people the best rate of growth is fast, faster, fastest. Yet, virtually all natural systems, from ecosystems to animals to organizations, have intrinsically optimal rates of growth.

Possibly for the first time, human kind has the chapters to create more than information than anyone can absorb, to foster far greater interdependency than anyone tin can manage, and to advance alter far faster than anyone's power to keep stride. Certainly the calibration of complexity is without precedent.

…managers oft fail to appreciate the extent to which their own expectations influence subordinates' functioning.

The more aggressive yous are in your behavior, the more than drastically y'all plow the knobs, the longer it volition take to reach the correct temperature.

Source: Thinkstockphotos.fr

…the essence of mastering systems thinking as a direction field of study lies in seeing patterns where others run across only events and forces to react to.

Individual learning does not guarantee organizational learning. Simply without information technology no organizational learning occurs.

Late in his career, the psychologist Abraham Maslow studied high performing teams. One of their most striking characteristics was shared vision and purpose.

It may only not be possible to convince man beings rationally to have a long-term view. People practice not focus on the long term because they have to, but because they want to.

In a remarkable book, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, Werner Heisenberg (formulator of the famous "Doubt Principle" in modern physics) argues that "Scientific discipline is rooted in conversations. The cooperation of different people may culminate in scientific results of the utmost importance".

Bohm identifies three basic weather condition that are necessary for dialogue:

all participants must "append" their assumptions, literally to hold them "as if suspended before us" ;
all participants must regard 1 another as colleagues ;
there must be a "facilitator" who "holds the context" of dialogue.

As Albert Einstein once wrote: "Our theories decide what we measure".

Business Schoolhouse Grenoble EM International Diplomacy Higher Education ESC Grenoble Strategy Web log Global Ed Graduate Concern Schoolhouse Marking Thomas

See as well:

Other Book Reviews

Fifth Subject: What To Practise When All Your Projects Are Failing

Shrinkonia: "When your company is struggling with projects, when all Project Managers are PMP certified, when every believable procedure seems to be in place, information technology is time to turn to The Fifth Bailiwick. No, this is not some kind of dark society. Information technology is the art of creating a learning organization."

The Fifth Discipline

Eric D. Chocolate-brown: "The volume tin be summed up in a few sentences…but they don't practice the book justice. Peter Senge states that in club to become a learning organization, the Five Disciplines must be adopted with the Systems Thinking discipline being the most important. He argues that Systems Thinking allows people and organizations to run into the deeper issues of problems."

Review: The Fifth Subject

Journey Guy: "Doing systems thinking means condign a learning arrangement. Information technology's a group of people all committed to the truth of where their organisation is/isn't and working from there with a wide, compelling vision every bit their reference point and goal."

smithwittife.blogspot.com

Source: https://globaleduc.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/book-review-the-fifth-discipline-2/